Mai Pa'a I Ka Leo: Historical Voice in Hawaiian Primary Materials, Looking Forward and Listening Back
In just over a century, from 1834 to 1948, Hawaiian writers filled 125,000 pages in nearly 100 different newspapers with their writings. The contents of those papers span a period when noted historians, expert genealogists, skilled storytellers, and cultural specialists were numerous, and their knowledge was intentionally recorded in writing for their contemporaries and for generations of the future.
Though scholars have generated entire books of history and legend with what they've extracted from these papers, only a tiny fraction, less than one percent of the whole, has been translated and published. The rest, equal to well over a million letter-size pages of text, remains untranslated, difficult to access in the original form, unused, and largely unknown.
The most familiar English translations have devleoped into a canon of chosen texts. The books that make up this powerful canon are problematic at best and yet flawed as they are, they have been the foundation of Hawaiian knowledge for most readers, teachers, and researchers for generations. Not only do these translations inadequately represent even the originals from which they were taken, but they further compound the problem by eclipsing the larger body of original writings that remain unrecognized.
Mai Pa‘a I Ka Leo focuses on how Hawaiian knowledge from the past has been handled in a basically English-speaking world. Author M. Puakea Noglemeier highlights the need to recognize and reincorporate the full array of historical Hawaiian resources into the foundations of current knowledge.
M. Puakea Noglemeier is an associate professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. A teacher, researcher, composer, and translator, Noglemeier is the director of Awaiaulu: Hawaiian Literature Project.
$26.95
isbn 978-1-58178-086-4
hardcover, 6x9, 286pp.
$16.95
isbn 978-1-58178-087-1
softcover, 6x9, 286pp.
Available at Bishop Museum's Shop Pacifica (phone 808-848-4158, email at shop@bishopmuseum.org) and other fine bookstores throughout the islands.
Tags: Bishop Museum Press, Hawaiian history, Hawaiian language newspapers, M. Puakea Noglemeier
